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Thirty years ago, I helped to run local election campaigns for the Labour Party in Hackney, the London borough where I still live.  There were no large sums of money involved and the technology deployed was very basic, principally pencils and sheets of paper on which were printed names and addresses.  Mostly the campaign was legwork, going door-to-door in the early evenings and at the weekends, speaking to potential voters, identifying those whom you judged most likely to support your party, and then persuading these good citizens to come out on polling day and mark their ballot papers for your candidates.   Turnout in London local elections is generally below half of the eligible electorate.  Boroughs are divided up into around twenty wards, and in mine, which had three Councillors, to get elected you needed around 1,000 to 1,200 votes.  Local politics can be just as hotly contested as national politics, and during election campaigns many of the candidates and activists would work long hours, fuelled by coffee and adrenaline, having convinced themselves that if our candidates were to win, a giant step would be taken towards achieving a happy socialist future; conversely, if the opposing party were to win, it would constitute a major triumph for the malevolent forces of reaction.  My role, as I understood it, was to remain calm and focus attention on the mundane task of ensuring that just over one thousand residents, who had been identified as sympathetic to Labour, knew the date the election was taking place, the location of the polling station, and the names of our candidates.

In 1993, one of our three Labour Ward Councillors was arrested and charged with fraud.  His crime was relatively trivial, claiming a couple of hundred pounds of expenses for travel to meetings that he had not attended, but British judges take the view that elected officials who defraud the public of its own money should be made an example and deserve full punishment for the crime.  He pleaded guilty at his trial and was sentenced to six months in prison.  He was forced to resign his seat.  I was then tasked with managing a tricky by-election campaign to try to retain the seat at a time when the local party’s reputation had been badly damaged.  Nonetheless, turnout at by-elections is often even lower than at the routine scheduled elections, and I was able to secure 757 votes for Labour’s new candidate, which was sufficient to win the seat once again, thereby launching the political career of the MP who is now the Chair of the Parliamentary Standards Committee.  After one more election cycle, my paid work commitments made it difficult for me to continue in my voluntary campaign manager role, and I passed on my responsibilities to others. 

Continue reading “On the level”

One of life’s great uncertainties is whether we will be remembered after our death, and if so by whom and in what way.  For most of us, the best we can hope is that friends and family will think kindly about us once we are gone.  To have made a positive impression upon and be well regarded by those who knew us best is no small thing.  For a few, records of whose words and deeds will be passed down to posterity, the expectation of lasting fame comes mixed with concern.  Will future generations remember them for the great things they achieved, or for some modest act with which they become associated?  Will future generations judge them more or less harshly than their contemporaries did?    Alfred (d. 899) the Saxon king of England, is now mostly remembered for allowing some cakes to burn, rather than his military victories, his legal and educational reforms, and his scholarship.  Richard (d. 1199), the Norman king of England, is celebrated today for his military prowess and piety, whereas the anti-Jewish riots which accompanied his coronation are largely forgotten.  Posthumous reputations are beyond the control of those to whom they attach.

Today, David Hume (d. 1776) is considered one of the pre-eminent British philosophers, whose work has greatly influenced not only the course of modern philosophy but also other important areas of social scientific study, notably psychology and economics.  During his lifetime, however, he was known primarily as an historian and essayist.  His History of England, published in six volumes, was widely discussed during his lifetime but not much today.  In a book published in 2008, the Hume scholar Annette Baier (d. 2012) wrote, I have been reading Hume now for sixty years, though it took retirement for me to really read his History of England.  Hume’s essays were also popular in his own day, ranging widely in length and subject matter, but mostly concerned with moral, political, and literary matters.  Last year, two hundred and eighty years after the first edition of the Essays was published, Oxford University Press issued the first, full critical edition – 1,200 pages in all – including a comprehensive account of the various published versions, with all revisions and deletions included.  Despite this new scholarly edition, they remain less familiar to most contemporary philosophers than Hume’s more overtly philosophical writings, which provoked widespread uninterest during his lifetime.

Continue reading “Death and taxes”

She sits, surrounded by an array of discarded objects, her head resting against her fist, her arm resting on her knee, her gaze resting on something, or someone, or maybe nothing in the far distance.  If she lived in the modern world, we might think that she was a bored student impatient for her studies to conclude so that her real life might begin; or a young traveller waiting for a much-delayed flight to a holiday destination; or, possibly, a refugee held in a temporary camp until the outcome of her appeal for permission to remain has been determined.  The young woman in question is, however, clearly not from our world.  Unlike most of us she has wings, and she shares her space with an undernourished dog and a dozing putto.  She sits – immobile – in a picture that was made in 1514. 

Albrecht Dürer’s engraving, Melencolia I, is on show at the National Gallery in London, as part of an exhibition that examines several major journeys the artist made during his working life.  I spent some time at the exhibition last weekend, my first visit to an art gallery this calendar year, and I enjoyed the chance to study the wide range of paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings that have been assembled.  Central to the exhibition are a group of Dürer’s works that was either made or shown during his lengthy visit to what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, during 1520-21.  Antwerp competed with Venice (another city that Dürer visited) to be the preeminent port in Europe, and for a man with ambitions to sell his work to collectors all over the continent, it was an ideal place for him to showcase his skills as a draughtsman.  As well as painting works on commission, he was one of the first artists to seek commercial success through the distribution of multiple copies of woodblock prints and engravings, which were cheaper and easier to transport.  Melencolia I is one such work, and perhaps his best. The image is overly crowded for modern taste, but despite all the objects on view nothing much seems to be going on.  The picture is highly symbolic, but its meanings remain obscure.

Continue reading “Unpetrified”

It’s New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2021 – I never know whether that makes it New Year’s Eve 2022, it being the day before the New Year of 2022, or New Year’s Eve 2021, being the last day of 2021. In any event, New Year’s Eve has some particular meaning for me for: seven years ago I shared probably the best kiss of my life with a woman who remains a kind of paramour, even though she lives on only now in the fog of memory. But I’m still going to enjoy a bottle of Pol Roger and a large tin of good caviar, in the front room, while the boy, alas, watches “Nashville’s Big Bash: New Year’s Eve Live” on CBS. We control almost nothing on this earth, but the most painful things which elude even our influence are the musical tastes of our progeny. I will sigh, and pour myself another glass of very good French champagne.

I shared my son’s musical proclivities with the oral historian, whose daughter – much younger – has at least better taste in music than “modern country sound.” She sent me a track that her daughter likes called Wifey, by Qveen Herby (in the waning days of 2021, I don’t take any of this too seriously), which is so much better than Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean puking melodramatic country-pop that I can’t begin to describe it. Don’t get me wrong, Wifey is pretty awful too, even worse when you think that a five year old girl in rural Maine likes it, but it’s at least got an edge. But only in the way that sophomore songs have an edge. That’s okay for five years olds, but oddly, that’s not the target market for sophomore songs.

Sophomore songs were a kind of pre-meme meme when I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s. Freshman came to school burdened with the musical tastes of their home towns – for me, that meant 70s art rock and funk; for the Jersey kids at Georgetown that meant a lot of early white boy rap and a solid dose of metal; the black kids had that great era of transition street music between early rap and the 90s explosion; hipsters had the post-REM alterno-rock golden years; and the girls had Madonna and to a lesser extent the Bangles and the like. We all came to mixed co-ed dorms, oddly constructed freshman mixers, a lot more alcohol and recreational drug access than most of us were used to, and graduate students who owned the college radio playlists.

As a result, pretty much everyone (except the hardcore Rush fans) went through a kind of transformation: our musical tastes got discombobulated. I was a non-hardcore Rush fan and suddenly I was listening to Belly and Morphine and the Breeders. My Iowa friend across the hallway was now totally into the Beastie Boys. The Iranian rich kid kept trying to get us into Euro disco trash (along with coke) but eventually buckled down and got down with Phish. The girls, though, somehow mystically got into what I could only figure out was sophomore rock. It was the soundtrack to “Friends” and “Dawson’s Creek” and “Beverly Hills 90210” – sugar candy pop that spent a lot of time talking about friendships that didn’t work out, boyfriends who weren’t that cool, unrequited love, anything but good things, but with a good solid Hollywood pop beat and white people singing everything and with a chord progression which somehow promised a future of reasonably but not perfectly happy marriage and family life.

At the same time, we all came to university – this was 1991 mind you – with a quite different attitude about philosophy. Georgetown was not an arts school: it was a Jesuit-run – and still deeply Jesuit-instilled – liberal arts college, where even the clods in the business school had a four semester requirement in theology and philosophy (although under pressure from the alumni, a sequence of remedial classes were open to those business school students who really just wanted to get their accounting degree and join PwC’s local practice in Philadelphia). Most of the kids – not me – had been to either Catholic high schools or Protestant tradition boarding schools, and they came with a philosophy ready baked. The philosophy sequence was, with rare exceptions, designed to reinforce a roughly pre-Enlightenment didactic worldview that would have gotten you thrown out of Thatcher’s Conservative Party but would have gotten you (and did, for several of my roughly co-aged Georgetown colleagues) elevated to the federal appeals or even Supreme Court by the Trump administration.

For those of us who either came from a critical thinking tradition – listen and debate and compare everything, but assume everything is wrong in its way – or from a non-tradition where no notion of intellectual truth had bubbled up through the miasma of post-boomer-age education, we were faced with a challenge, which as I look on the last couple centuries of undergraduate education is really the norm. Once you get past high school – secondary school – where you were taught mostly by rote, and you are suddenly exposed to primary texts and a modicum of questioning, you are dangerously at risk of falling in love, much as undergraduates are dangerously at risk of falling in love with one another and, much more perilously, are dangerously at risk of falling in love with Phish. You are given access to the full bore of Western and Eastern thought, and usually, are given access to it by educators who are so human that they are actually trying to do anything except help you navigate it all.

A lot of us, alas, end up as sophomores.

In music, it means we end up in 1991 with a lot of Spin Doctors CDs, and need to throw them out in a dumpster behind a Burger King in 1997. In film, it leads to a lifelong obsession with “Sex in the City” and “Seinfeld”, unspoken perhaps but more likely celebrated with others of the same persuasion with binge nights involving similarly bad wine choices as those made when you had to have the one person in the quad apartment with a decent fake ID buy a few bottles of Carlo Rossi. In literature you end up with a lot of unread James Joyce and all-too-much-read Philip Roth and Martin Amis and Susan Sontag. In art you have way too many posters of French apologist photography of the late 1940s and a similar surfeit of Klimpt prints – oh, and bad origami. It even infects our diet: we eat less fast food crap and more vegetarian crap, basically staying price-point neutral and taste-neutral as well. We replace light lager with cheap red wine or, if we’re devoted to the sophomoric pursuit of alcoholism, off-brand vodka or Jack Daniels.

In philosophy, though, it means we end up with a bad love affair with Neitzsche, or Ayn Rand, or Nikolai Krapotkin, or Chez Guevara. We end up with the people who tell us what to think, tell us what not to think, tell us what everyone before us did wrong, tell us how we are capable of being better and “they” aren’t. They aren’t totally discredited by losing a war like that idiot Hitler, who took things too far and besides wasn’t anything more than a failed-out Austrian corporal in the wrong army; they aren’t totally discredited by actually having ever assumed power like Mao, who everyone kind of admired but because his own country rejected him lost a good deal of credibility. Philosophically, sophomores gravitated to the people who never actually did anything, but did write a lot, and ideally wrote a lot during times where they weren’t popular enough to be fully rejected by critical thinkers.

It took a lot back then to be a critical thinker. The sorting mechanism that is undergraduate life was heavily biased towards the kids and their enablers who came in already fully engaged in a mainstream philosophy – whether at Georgetown it was Catholicism mixed with libertarian republicanism, or at Oxbridge it was milquetoast Marxism mixed with analytical philosopy, or on the West Coast it was libertarian anarchism, or in Canada it was multicultural communitarianism. If you entered with that – from a Jesuit high school, from Eton or Winchester or an appropriate grammar school, or from Palo Alto High, or from an Anglo Montreal prep school – you were in good shape. But if you weren’t, then you had another path that could sail you through: you either rebelled against your foundations or you gravitated independently towards the sophomore philosophers.

It struck me this weekend, watching some historical documentaries with my son, that this was really the lure of Hitler back in the late 20s with Mein Kampf, perhaps the only sophomoric piece of philosophy that can compete with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand in terms of being basically mental cotton candy – simple sugars practically designed to hit the pleasure centres of the brain. America’s great simpish popularisers – Williams Jennings Bryant, Father Coughlin, Barry Goldwater – all made the mistake of trying to appear rational and normal. Rand, Neitzsche, and Hitler all realised that the transformative impact comes from sweeping away any attempt at decency or quality – just like the sophomoric artists that pull in second year college students ignore the same in creating 25 minutes of improv rock which requires a careful balance of THC, MDMA, and Everclear to appreciate, just like Damian Hirst, in a cocaine haze, realized that the more crass and ugly he made his sculptures, up to and including their suggested retail sale price, the more it would appeal to the sophomores, maybe past college in their careers in banking or art curation but still stuck in their zones of self-terror, that zone where they don’t know what they like but are terrified to admit it.

Because that is, really, the space of the sophomores in any space. The freshman, the plebes, everyone knows they don’t know – and there’s no shame in them not knowing either. The upperclassmen, on the other hand, in theory have knowledge, but they also have to assume a position of knowledge: they’ve chosen their course of study and thus their course in life. They now have to fake it to make it, as the current phraseology describes. By the time they are allowed to graduate, they have to project some kind of confidence in their choices or else they’ll not even be allowed to become fully fledged adults.

Sophomores are the suckers. They are caught in the middle – between being allowed to be caught in the snares of youth and not being allowed to escape the tendrils of adult society – and thus they are most vulnerable. You don’t find many adults who take Krapotkin seriously, and when you do, they are laughable. You find more Ayn Rand fans – dear lord, take a look at the non-Trump Republican party – but they are laughable in their way as well, just as the Democrats who cling to their notions of Guevara or Robert Kennedy are similarly embarrassing to those of us who just want to figure out how to pass an infrastructure bill.

Sophomores do form the weird foam upon which our modern society sits. Most of us, of course, are indoctrinated early – we are “left” or “right” wing, and feel comfortable within the truths given to us long before we actually had a range of choice to challenge our notions of right and wrong. Some of us also end up in a happy zone of full choice: our parents and teachers gave us the safety and nudging and encouragement and gentle ridicule which inured us to the simplistic effects of bombast and fiery rhetoric. It may have left us in a place where we’re still – even in our late 40s- questioning what the right choice should be on centralized versus localized political structures, over coercive versus collaborative legal forms, but it’s still better than being rigid. But so many people try to stay open but are hijacked in their thinking by sugary sweet rhetoric, by false dichotomies in argument, by Mein Kampf or by qAnon or by the non-linguistic side of Chomsky or by Senator Warren from Masschusetts.

Thirty years ago, on December 31, 1991, I was a freshman. I’m still not a senior by any means. But I hope that the philosophical obstacle course I’ve run in the last three decades will set up my son to avoid the sophomore trap. He’ll probably show up as a freshman loving country music – but hopefully he’ll never think the Spin Doctors are anything other than crap. That will be a moral victory – and even better, if he thinks Ayn Rand and Nikolai Krapotkin are no better than “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”, he’ll also be right. Fingers crossed.

From the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition, discovering how to distinguish what is true from what is false, what is good from what is bad and, therefore, learning how best to live, has regularly been described in terms of improved vision.  Ignorance, wickedness, and wrongdoing are associated with darkness, whereas truth, goodness and justice are associated with light.  If I combine this long-standing metaphor – knowing as seeing – with the metaphor I referred to in my previous text – life as a journey – then we might say that the passage from a state of blindness to a state of clear-sightedness, that is, life as a voyage towards ever greater enlightenment, is something that is desirable in-itself.

Perhaps the most famous example of these entwined metaphors is found in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates describes the myth of the cave.   This myth expresses an underlying assumption found in almost all Western philosophical thought, that the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is an uphill struggle, but one that is worth undertaking despite the effort involved.  It should be remembered that the context for this myth is Socrates’s argument that the ideal state would be justified in requiring those who had become enlightened to give up their time and energy to serve others in the community, by devoting themselves to good governance and education.  Enlightenment, Socrates suggests, brings to its beneficiaries duties as well as pleasures.  Access to truth is not just for the few, but for all.

Continue reading “Ignorance, part III”